Flanders (11 page)

“Yes, sir. Going back out to watch the game, sir.”

“Must take your rum with?”

That went all over me like a cold-water shower. “Look, Sergeant? Can I speak frankly, sir?”

Riddell shrugged. “Bloody ’abit with you.”

“I don’t know what you folks expect. And it’s not like I drink a lot, not like you boys do when you’re kicking up your heels. Hell, I never touched a drop before I came here, but you were always pushing it on me, remember? I figure you didn’t want me to notice I was sitting in a hole getting shelled, or you didn’t want me to notice I was being fed shit. A little swaller of rum every once in a while don’t affect my aim, sir. Don’t I shoot enough goddamned Boche for you?”

In the corner, Elgar played on in a proper and upstanding major key.

Riddell lay back down, closed his eyes. “You’re such the Yank, Stanhope. Always fighting a revolution, even one you’ve just concocted. Seriously lad, me mum ’as a recipe to ’elp the craving. When you want for it, ask. But don’t let this go on, for as it sits now, I can picture the day that you’ll end up arrested and thrown in the glasshouse, or worse, me or Dunleavy will ask you out for a summary execution.”

He wants to put a scare into me. But hell, Bobby, it’s not like I get drunk or nothing. Not like Pa. It’s just that I’m hungry and cold all the time. Seems, too, like I’m either scared shitless or bored.
They
drink and nobody says Jack Shit about it. There’s nobody here to talk to, Bobby. Lord, how I miss home. I hear the rain sometimes when I’m half asleep and think it’s a creek flowing clear and clean through limestone. I smell onions cooking and imagine it’s a pot of pinto beans starting. Damn it. It’s not like I’m fall-down drunk or nothing. It’s not like they make it sound. The rum ration is just a little something to keep my mind off things, Bobby, that’s all. It’s just a little something to do.

Travis Lee

* * *

JUNE 26, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

It was Sunday when we started back. Each time we leave the safety of the reserve area I want to grab hold of the earth and not let go.

They held church before we started the long march. I stood by a crumbling stone wall near the YMCA pavilion and listened to a choir carol that damned lie: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

That’s where O’Shaughnessy caught up with me. He’d shucked his British Army uniform for that black dress of his, and he was wearing what looked like a girl’s lacy nightgown over it.

“Well, isn’t it a perfect symbolic sight I’m coming across: God and men within, Travis Stanhope without. ’Tis your choice, lad. God and those men would accept you.”

He was the brightest thing in the world that morning. The linen shone like sun on snow. His skin was so pale and cheeks so ruddy, his face glowed like a lantern. “You’re all dressed up to go out, Reverend. Don’t you have something to do?”

“A dismissal, is it? But Mass is over.
Missa est.
You have a grand romantic loneliness in you, Travis. It’s that you needn’t, is what I’m saying.”

A pert little sparrow lit on a nearby branch. Not a Texas sparrow, but near enough.

O’Shaughnessy said, “Have you noticed that the world is full of symbols, Travis? Of course you have, you loving poetry like you do. And did you know that Martin Luther gave us that lofty hymn you’re hearing? But Luther was a terrible wastrel of a man. He threw away the finest parts of the Church: the symbols.”

Way beyond the pavilion, I could see LeBlanc standing. He was looking my way, probably wondering why I’d been snubbing him; why, this near eternity, he suddenly found himself alone. Men die here. They lose their arms, their legs, their minds. There shouldn’t be any fretting over Martin Luther or bad influences. In Flanders, nothing matters much.

O’Shaughnessy clapped his hands. “A boy of few words, I see. We must discuss Emily Dickinson one day. A fine, precise use of words she had. Keen as a paring knife. We Irish love the language, but it’s our habit to run on and on.”

The hymn ended, and following on its heels came the doxology. I picked up my pack and settled its load across my shoulders.

“And a heavy weight it is, Travis,” O’Shaughnessy said, “with the sin of rum filling your canteen.”

I threw the pack down. “Goddamn it! So that’s why Miller wanted me to talk to you! Well, you can just tell him to keep his damned nose out of my business. I won these watered-down excuses for rations fair and square. So I add a couple of drops to my canteen. So what? It cuts the taste of the chlorine. Besides, you don’t have no right to talk. You’re the one who gives out wine to folks, and to little kids, to boot. The church where I grew up, it was grape juice. I’ve seen how you papists work. You smoke. You drink whiskey. Don’t you try to put no hellfire and brimstone on me.”

He laughed. The company began filing out of the pavilion into the light. I shouldered my pack and hurried fast as I could away.

An hour later Uncle Miller called us into formation and I was glad to go. We were shelled all the way back, but it was such a slow metal rain that we didn’t bother to take cover. We walked, listening to the whistles as they came down, flinching at the crumps and spurts of dirt when they hit. Light artillery, and you could hear death coming so slow that you could step out of its way. We stopped to rest with shells falling all around; and when we got to the trenches, we found that the cooks had fixed bubble and squeak. Riddell rhapsodized about it so, that it must have been to him like Ma’s venison chili is to me.

“All that’s needed is bangers or a bite of toasted cheese, maybe an egg sandwich.”

And down in that slime trench with the stench of shit and the rot of old French corpses, the rest of the platoon agreed. Bubble and squeak. Tasted like death to me.

I dreamed about Trantham and the graveyard last night. He was calling something pitiful. I started to go get him, but the place beyond the cypress was too dark, like the spot where the world ends. I yelled for Trantham to come out. He didn’t. God, Bobby. He’s in the place ghosties come from.

Travis Lee

* * *

JUNE 28, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

Pickering thinks they’ll be sending us over the top soon. Him and Smoot are having us make jam-pots and Battye bombs, ’cause there aren’t near enough real grenades. Old Uncle Miller’s been bearing down on the inspections, and yesterday he cut poor, shy Marrs a new asshole for having dirt in his gun.

Something’s for sure going on. There’s rumors all up and down the line, and I hear tell that when we left the rear area, Riddell left his precious gramophone and Elgar behind.

Keep Ma’s church group praying hard, ’cause you just can’t never tell.

Travis Lee

* * *

JULY 2, POSTCARD FROM THE FRONT

Dear Bobby,

We moved out a few days ago. Got us some new trenches.

They aren’t half bad. Food still tastes like what you get mucking out the chicken coop.

Kiss Ma for me,

Travis Lee

* * *

JULY 2, FLANDERS

Dear Bobby,

One day we’ll sit down on the front porch swing. We’ll have ourselves some lemonade and crack us a bowlful of pecans. When the sun goes down, we’ll light the coal oil lamps and listen to the frogs croon by the stock tank. We’ll count June bugs. Some easy evening when we’re together again, Bobby, that’s when I’ll give you this letter.

On the last night of June we went over the top. It was still that morning, but by afternoon the wind had kicked up.

“Don’t like that wind,” Foy said. “Coming straight at us.”

Unless the wind changed, Fritz would use gas.

Marrs wrote a last letter to his girlfriend. “How many Maxims you think?” he asked, and tucked the letter in a pocket near his heart.

“Lots and lots. Why, you’ll have blood all over, that way,” Pickering said. “She’ll have to wash it to read it, Marrs, and the ink will all run.”

Dunleavy snapped, “Shut up. Fasten that webbing.”

I checked my ammunition, checked it again. My hands shook, and I hoped no one could see me trembling.

Pickering punched Marrs in the side. “Just don’t get shot in the brain, like you were last time. As soon as they start firing, Marrs, sit your plump bum down.”

Quiet. I never heard the world so quiet. Standing shoulder to shoulder with a thousand men, but not a cough, not a mutter. Then from that hush came a low mosquito buzz. Everyone looked up. Overhead was an aeroplane, one of Fritz’s. The batteries set up a thumping barrage, over as quick as it started. It
was a little yellow plane, Bobby, tiny as a toy; and it went down in silence, painting a thin black line of smoke down the blue wall of the sky.

When the sun was low and the light was brassy they ordered us up the communication trench, jostling, single file. The hole stank of last year’s corpses. Behind us our own big guns rang out for the fourth time in as many hours. As the sun set, British fire lit up the gray dusk.

Whispers approached up the trench. A hissed “Stanhope!” from Smoot in front. “Forward companies ready, pass it on.” I turned to Marrs and gave him the message, and the message was carried back to waiting officers by a thousand voices, one by one. The earth shook. The walls of the trench crumbled. Dirt spattered us. I fingered my gas mask just to make sure it was there. I clutched my rifle tighter.

The Boche couldn’t survive that shelling. Nothing could. The Tommies gave them earthquakes of artillery, geysers of dazzling fire. I pictured the Boche cramped together in their small dark places, terror-stricken by noise. God, Bobby. The bright, dreadful beauty of it. I wondered if the barrage that had killed McPhearson and wounded me had looked as awesome from a distance.

In too short a time—but it had always seemed so far—we were at the front-line trench. Riddell barked: “Fourteen here, sir!” and I shouldered my way into the crowd. The sun had set. The only light was the flickering orange glow from the English shelling. Dunleavy handed out the rum ration—unwatered this time—a scant jigger for each. A jigger. And I wanted so bad to get drunk.

Riddell climbed halfway up the ladder and took a quick peek through the trench periscope. I would be climbing that ladder myself in a minute or so. I’d go sprinting across a place only fools set foot. I doubted I was brave enough, and that scared me even more.

Strange, Bobby, seeing yourself as a feeble collection of meat and bone. A bullet could stop me in a heartbeat, shrapnel silence my brain mid-thought. Gas could burn my lungs; I’d drown in my own juices. And I would do it to myself, just because I’d climbed a goddamned ladder.

Riddell barked out an order: “Masks on!”

The mask smelled of new leather; the valve tasted like old pennies. The goggles made me half-blind. I tucked the hem into my collar and wondered if I had fastened it well enough.

A hand touched my back. In the flashing light of the barrage I turned and saw the insignia. Miller, only the sad eyes in his goggles recognizable. He squeezed past me.

The Boche returned fire, a lackluster, light artillery. Above No Man’s Land star shells burst into pale greenish light.

Time. Miller was at the ladder and we were going and there wasn’t any time. Cold settled in my lungs and I started to shiver hard. Around me a collection of faceless waiting men. Smoot—I think it was Smoot—fiddling with his bandolier.

Miller’s hand lifted to the rungs. Another deep-throated barrage, then the sharp icy shrieks of the whistles and Miller was up the ladder and gone, another soldier behind him, another.